Linux From A CIO's Perspective

An anonymous reader writes "CIO.com has a story on Linux and OSS in the enterprise from the perspective of the CIO of Cendant Travel Distribution Services, Mickey Lutz. 'In the summer of 2003, Mickey Lutz did something that most CIOs, even today, would consider unthinkable: He moved a critical part of his IT infrastructure from the mainframe and Unix to Linux. For Lutz, the objections to Linux, regarding its technical robustness and lack of vendor support, had melted enough to justify the gamble.' His organization saved 90% in costs in so doing. Read on if you want to see how the top brass views OSS."

Comments

Difficult, but big payoff

[AKAImBatman]

This pretty much sums it up:

Lutz's IT group rewrote a complex, real-time airline pricing application that serves hundreds of thousands of travel agents around the world and that also acts as the system of record for all of United Airlines' ticket reservations. When this application came up on Linux, it proved to be so demanding--it handles up to 700 pricing requests per second--that it completely redefined Cendant's expectations about what it would take to get Linux to work. "We have broken every piece of software we've ever thrown at this platform, including Linux itself," says Lutz.

With Big Iron you're paying a LOT of money. But you're not paying it for nothing. Big Iron will give you a lot of guarantees for stability, reliability, and thoroughput that don't exist on other systems. The key to this CIO's success is that he was willing to accept the challenges of doing Big Iron work on Little Brass systems. As long as you work all the details out yourself, this *can* work. (As Google has so eloquently proven.) The issue is that you're working without a safety net. If things go really wrong, there's no backup army of specially trained techs to run in and fix things. (And trust me, if you're paying enough money you'll have your own personal army of techs.)

The upshot to all of this is that if the gamble pays off, it pays off in a big way. All that money you were spending for a personal army, plus some other company's R&D now goes into your own pockets. You don't get away scott free (someone has to maintain the systems), but you see your rewards. And isn't that what business is about? Taking risks and making profits? If you've got the infrastructure to go for something like this, then go ahead and grab fate by the balls. No one ever got anywhere in life by playing it safe. ;-)

The "black box" of open source has transformed into something any CIO can appreciate: reliable performance and consistent uptime. The penguin can fly now.

Re:Difficult, but big payoff

[stefanlasiewski]

The issue is that you're working without a safety net. If things go really wrong, there's no backup army of specially trained techs to run in and fix things.

Well, there is a backup Army, and it's you.

Google can have a 4000-node Linux cluster because they have enough staff to maintain and optimize the system (Keep an eye on their job pages to get an idea).

Google also has some highly specalized needs-- some machines only crunch data for the DB, other machines only serve webpages, etc. It's in their interest to optimize the Kernel, OS, Database & Web applications as much as possible. Take a tweak which gains a 1% performance gain, multiply that against 4000 machines, and it's quite an advantage.

There isn't a vendor in the world that can totally support their infrastructure, so Google does it themselves.

Re:Difficult, but big payoff

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a tweak which gains a 1% performance gain, multiply that against 4000 machines, and it's quite an advantage.

Let's see . . . that's . . . [pencil scratching] . . . 1%! Amazing!

Re:Difficult, but big payoff

[Decaff]

Let's see . . . that's . . . [pencil scratching] . . . 1%! Amazing!

Yes, 1% - but 1% of what? If you have thousands of machines, it can be quite a saving.

Re:Difficult, but big payoff

[AKAImBatman]

Well, there is a backup Army, and it's you.

No, you are the front lines army. The backup army was the reason you were paying the annual fees. Without those annual fees, there is no backup army. i.e. If you can't get it right, there's no one else to come in and fix it for you.

Take a tweak which gains a 1% performance gain, multiply that against 4000 machines, and it's quite an advantage.

That's something of a straw man argument. If 3 Sun machines and 10 LinTel boxes have the same Flop capacity, then a 1% increase in either one will add up to the same increase in computing power. The key difference is that there are only three Sun machines to update.

There isn't a vendor in the world that can totally support their infrastructure, so Google does it themselves.

That doesn't mean that there couldn't be. Google made their choice to go with a large number of decentralized systems. It works for them and it works well. But they have to do everything internally *because* of that decision. Had they gone the EBay route, they would be able to get that backup army, but then they would pay for the priveledge.

Re:Difficult, but big payoff

[Anonymous Coward]

Minor quibbles:

"In hindsight," says Lutz, "we shouldn't have tried to cut over to a new infrastructure at the same time we were deploying a new software application. It was too much at once."

and

Once the problem servers were pinpointed, a 40- to 50-person cutover team of IBM, Red Hat and Cendant engineers brought the problems under control by throwing more servers into the mix.

Too much at once and support was available when it went awry.

Re:Difficult, but big payoff

[hdparm]

Well, I'll give 100% of my present salary if I can have it replaced with 1% of Bill Gates' net worth. Thank you very much.

Re:Difficult, but big payoff

[s100w]

You'd think that if "even a little downtime is a big deal," and you're rewriting your company's core application, you'd test it under a realistic load before launching it. If "... the team could not build a subset of the production environment to accurately predict how the penguins would fly," it's a red flag something is amiss with your architecture.

Re:Difficult, but big payoff

[ArsonSmith]

You forgot to carry the 1, it's actually 42%

Re:Difficult, but big payoff

[FatherOfONe]

Dude I use to work for Cendant, and I can tell you that the "Army of IBM" people you got was mostly a bunch of idiots. They use to be good, but most don't know jack anymore.

I won't get in to the fact that they (IBM) flat out stole $150 Million from a Cendant affiliate (RCI) by telling them that they could build a distibuted system to replace their mainframe. You could sit in the room with the IBMers and they would say "This thing is NEVER going to work, we can't replicate data to all these AS400's around the world in that time"; then they would get up in front of upper managment and tell them they were "right on track". Then when Cendant finally pulled the plug on the system they said that they would have finished it, but just were not given the chance. Now for the sad part... They didn't even have one freaking line of code written! None! $150 MILLION and nothing done. That sir is your "Army" of experts.

Believe it or not IBM was broght in on several other occasions, and with each one they generally proved themselves incompetent. Expensive and incompetent.

Another example was some serious performance issues on their mainframe. TCP/IP was not configured correctly, and no patches had been applied in years (The mainframe was moved from Indy to NJ and new support people that didn't patch/update stuff).... Well they called IBM again.. and again and again... multiple people came out and didn't do jack. FINALLY IBM sent in a RETIRED guy and he fixed the problem in less than 4 hours. Actually he worked on the problem for around an hour and had is solved. My guess is that guy is long gone now, and the knowlege he had is also gone.

Re:Difficult, but big payoff

[haystor]

$150Million and nothing to show for it?!

I'd killed the project for half that and delivered it dead on arrival early too.

Re:Difficult, but big payoff

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh please, go read what Big Blue says about the ability to take a reliable snapshot on mounted JFS filesystems under AIX 5.2, and you'll see the "guarantees for stability, reliability"

Re:Difficult, but big payoff

[slashflood]

Google can have a 4000-node Linux cluster

Sorry, but last time I counted, Google had 120.000 Linux machines...

Re:Difficult, but big payoff

[stefanlasiewski]

No, you are the front lines army. The backup army was the reason you were paying the annual fees. Without those annual fees, there is no backup army.

Well, sometimes even with the annual fees there is no backup army.

In my experience with small to mid-sized businesses, external vendors can't support much beyond the core product. If you customize the site beyond a minimum level, the vendor can't support it well (But they will still take your money).

In Google's case, they made the choice to optimize their product at the expense of external support. In their case, I don't see why they would trust their core busines to an external vendor.

eBay went a different route. They use a large amount of external support for their product. However, look at the news for eBay or talk to an eBay engineer-- they constantly have technical problems, the site occasionally has major user-facing bugs, it's not unusual for 1000 customers to get eaten up in a server crash.

eBay & Google are in two different markets. Google was a latecomer to the highly-competitive Search arena, and is facing off against giants like Yahoo & Microsoft. They need to have a maximum-optimized quality product, which you can only get with internal support.

eBay is the only large online auction vendor, and has no competitors that are as threatening as Google's competitors. This means that they can use external support to save money, but it means a lower quality technical product.

i.e.If you can't get it right, there's no one else to come in and fix it for you.

I absolutely agree.

Re:Difficult, but big payoff

[turbidostato]

"Yes, 1% - but 1% of what? If you have thousands of machines, it can be quite a saving."

Yeah. You will achieve an amazing saves of about... 1%.

It migth seem an amazing absolute sum to you, but it still will be nothing but a 1% discount on their bill.

Re:Difficult, but big payoff

[Peeteriz]

It's not like you can't pay a huge amount of money and get an army of outside Linux consultants and come and do things for you if something goes wrong.

You can get the same service for the same amount of money if you want to - with Linux you actually get a choice, though, instead of having to pay the huge amount of money even if the Big Iron support somehow proves nearly useless to you.

unthinkable?

[delirium of disorder]

Moving desktops to linux might be considdered revolutionary, but this isn't. The big iron market of servers and HPC machines has really been dominated by linux for several years now.

Re:unthinkable?

[winkydink]

It is in the Fortune 500. As a previous poster pointed out, big iron means very high reliability. Lutz made a very brave decision and made it work.

Re:unthinkable?

[Transcendent]

Dominated? I think not.

When you need reliability, you don't use linux. When you want to cut costs and are willing to gamble with reliability... then you use linux.

Read the article.

Re:unthinkable?

[delirium of disorder]

I donno....google seams pretty reliable. Akamai web caching is designed to ensure online reliability (and is Linux based). The standard for Internet based systems that need long uptime and robustness is GNU/Linux. This is because the web as a popular medium is only about a decade old. The only reason why other organizations (banks and the military for example) that need reliable systems have not migrated to Linux is because they use legacy code that would be expensive to port.

The particular solution the CIO in the article choose gambled with reliability because they used 144 separate servers in 12 clusters. Well implemented clusters of x86 hardware can run seamlessly, but individual machines are likely to fail. Redundancy should mean that a couple blown power supplies or corrupted disks a year is no big deal, but it's still a slight risk and a pain to fix. There are Linux solutions that run on larger machines. They could have replaced their four IBM mainframes with four Linux mainframes. IBM supports Linux on the zSeries mainframes (formerly called System/390, before that System/370, which was the successor to System/360..its about as traditional a mainframe as you can still buy). The top high end computers are Linux based. The top 3 most powerful computers in the world at this time, two IBM eServers and a Sgi Altix, all run Linux. Linux offers the most flexible, powerful, and reliable solutions out there.

Re:unthinkable?

[hdparm]

When you need reliability, you don't use linux.

This is definitelly NOT TRUE anymore. Are you saying that Chicago Mercantile Exchange was after cutting costs and they never needed reliable, just cheap system. That's just one of the examples.

Re:unthinkable?

[apqvist]

The standard for Internet based systems that need long uptime and robustness is GNU/Linux.

Really? http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html

Re:unthinkable?

[Anonymous Coward]

As opposed to the standard for people who ONLY care about long uptime.

Re:unthinkable?

[The Master Control P]

I found that a little suspicious when I first saw it a few months ago. So I followed the little link at the top of that page to their FAQ. Choice quote:

"Additionally HP-UX, Linux, NetApp NetCache, Solaris and recent releases of FreeBSD cycle back to zero after 497 days, exactly as if the machine had been rebooted at that precise point. Thus it is not possible to see a HP-UX, Linux or Solaris system with an uptime measurement above 497 days"

Re:unthinkable?

[bit01]

You left out some important context:

Why do some Operating Systems never show uptimes above 497 days ?

The method that Netcraft uses to determine the uptime of a server is bounded by an upper limit of 497 days for some Operating Systems (see above). It is therefore not possible to see uptimes for these systems that go beyond this upper limit. Although we could in theory attempt to compute the true uptime for OS's with this upper limit by monitoring for restarts at the expected time, we prefer not to do this as it can be inaccurate and error prone.

In other words, it's not an OS problem as your quote accidentally suggested, it's a measurement technique problem.

Linux beats Unix on cost

[bedroll]

The only thing that makes this news is that a CIO actually recognized it.

Re:Linux beats Unix on cost

[delirium of disorder]

Linux beats Unix on cost
Really? ... The cost of the operating system itself is free in the Unix (BSD) world, as the Linux world. Propritary Unix may have some liscencing cost, but hardware and support are bigger price factors.

Re:Linux beats Unix on cost

[databyss]

Don't forget the cost of porting applications that your business depends on.

Re:Linux beats Unix on cost

[youknowmewell]

I don't know how to tell you this, but... I think that was the point of the article.

Re:Linux beats Unix on cost

[bedroll]

Yeah, think of the reading that could be saved if someone simply read my summary instead.

Re:Linux beats Unix on cost

[Anonymous Coward]

When a CIO talks, on the record, of replacing billygathgatesOS with, well, anything else... that's news.

Considered unthinkable

[Anonymous Coward]

would consider unthinkable: He moved a critical part of his IT infrastructure from the mainframe and Unix to Linux.

This is actually quite thinkable. Now if some CIO moved all his desktops to Linux, I would be impressed. Moving the backoffice stuff from expensive licenses of Unix and mainframes to Linux is a no-brainer.

Re:Considered unthinkable

[Decaff]

Moving the backoffice stuff from expensive licenses of Unix and mainframes to Linux is a no-brainer.

No it isn't. There are many very high volume commercial and financial websites that use features of commercial Unixes, such as memory and resource partitioning, self-healing, fault management and very high scalability. Linux will certainly get all these at some point, but until then it is certainly not a 'no-brainer' to move. Even with smaller systems there are many applications that require certain Unix versions.

Re:Considered unthinkable

[Scurrilous Knave]

I'm not sure how to respond to the "no-brainer" label. My development team just migrated our company's production software development platform from a network of aging HP-UX machines (which served us quite well in their day, don't get me wrong) to a Linux network. The new development tools run 20 times faster (that's the actual figure, not hyperbole), our experience over the past two years is that the Linux network is much more reliable, and the server hardware is simply an increment onto their existing Windows server lease and support contracts, not a whole separate costly item like the HP's were. I don't know the exact dollar figure it'll save them every year, but I know it's major. For us, the developers, it was definitely a no-brainer.

But management fought us kicking and screaming every step of the way. They weren't really sure what they wanted, they just knew they didn't really want Linux. After repeated patient, detailed explanations of the cost savings and productivity benefits were met with skepticism and outright disbelief, we finally had to create an extensive Six Sigma analysis of the business and technical case for our choice. I can't fault them for wanting that, but once they got it, they seemed rather sorry they'd asked, because it supported every word we'd already said. For them, it was far from a no-brainer.

Now, how they were using their brains, I cannot say. To us, it looked like a child screaming about getting a vital vaccination. But despite their grumbling and repeated shots of the stink-eye our way, they now have their new system in place and it works great. The other developers love what they see.

Of course, our whole team is being laid off and all development is moving to India, but that's beside the point. (That was in the works long before we were even condsidering the migration. Honest!)

ok, and?

[coolGuyZak]

I'll be modded troll...

This news is all well and great, but it's been known for a while that moving from UNIX->Linux was cheaper. What should be focused on is the switch from Win -> Linux... Of course, that's not going to be showcased, because the costs of running either system are about equal.

Re:ok, and?

[AKAImBatman]

This news is all well and great, but it's been known for a while that moving from UNIX->Linux was cheaper.

That's not entirely true. If you look at the TCO, Linux is only cheaper if you're willing to cut out the safety nets that are so expensive. i.e. If you get an annual mantenence contract with RedHat and Dell, then how much are you actually saving over a Sun machine with a contract for both?

Corporate purchasing decisions are never as simple as the upfront cost. The key is that if you're willing to take a little bit of risk, you can save a lot of money. That's effectively what this article is about.

Re:ok, and?

[LnxAddct]

This may just be my ignorance speaking, but last time I checked Windows had horrific High Performance Clustering capabilities, so there is no comparison to make. In addition, the licensing issues to go along with Windows 2003 advanced server or whatever you need to get HPC is ridiculous. Meanwhile, Red Hat has great clustering capabilitiesn enterprise support for it, and the clusters work well and are integrated giving high ease of use and great performance. Thats why this CIO went with them and if you read the article, he is sticking with them because he's been so impressed by them. Microsoft has no game in HPC.
Regards,
Steve

Re:ok, and?

[jonadab]

> Last time I checked Windows had horrific High Performance Clustering

I have no personal experience with that, but I suspect you're right, based on extrapolation upward, given that, at the low-end, recent Windows versions seem to require more hardware to do almost anything.

> In addition, the licensing issues to go along with Windows 2003 advanced
> server or whatever you need to get HPC is ridiculous.

That's irrelevant for this article. This CIO was dealing with systems at the high end of enterprise servers, where your tape backup system goes into five figures. On that kind of budget, a site license for anything Microsoft has ever written will fit nicely under "Miscellaneous". Robustness and how well the hardware can be utilized are much more important considerations.

For small business, or for desktop scenerios, the licenses are a big issue, but not here.

Re:ok, and?

[hdparm]

Well, for my organisation it is much cheaper. After all discounts we get from both sides, we'll spend about $3,500.00 over 3 years for RHE licences. Quote I got from MS was in a range of $50,000 over 3 years (server/desktop OS/CALs, SQL/CALs, Exchange/CALs, Office). That's a no-brainer. We are lucky not to depend on any particular apps written for windows, which makes our life much easier, though. Once ISVs start realising that people actually want to move from very expensive Windows environments and finally make native Linux ports of their apps, you'll be able to see plenty of Win-->Lin switch statistics.

Re:ok, and?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not entirely true. If you look at the TCO, Linux is only cheaper if you're willing to cut out the safety nets that are so expensive. i.e. If you get an annual mantenence contract with RedHat and Dell, then how much are you actually saving over a Sun machine with a contract for both?

The big advantage of Sun is that their hardware scales. They can sell you a monster box that will run your existing apps much faster, without changing the app. Linux on intel only scales to a certain size. Once you reach that limit, you have to look at clustering the app.

Re:ok, and?

[Anonymous Coward]

The scaling story is getting old, these days with things like Bluegene, the entire thing has pretty much become moot, linux will scale as far as near any sane person wants it to scale.

I'm reading through this and it's interesting.

[Anonymous Coward]

There are two things I find really interesting here:

1. Vendor support. OK, so if vendor support has gotten better, then which vendors does this CIO recommend? I don't see which ones he used in the article, maybe I just missed something.
   
2. This quote

   "Open source is propelling us to adopt Java and a new way of programming," he says.

   Should be a bit of a cluebat for both Sun and the Open Source extremists. Java and Open Source can be extremely good for each other, it's just that both Sun and the Open Source community need to learn to cooperate on practical matters with those whose ideological goals differ... unfortunately it seems that neither Sun nor the Open Source community is extremely interested in realizing how much they could benefit from the other.

Re:I'm reading through this and it's interesting.

[thammoud]

Most companies (including us) that use the popular Linux/Java combination do so without caring about any Open Source ideolgies. The combination is simply outstanding.

Re:I'm reading through this and it's interesting.

[saider]

The sidebar indicated that he used Red Hat.

Re:I'm reading through this and it's interesting.

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

ibm is his vendor. says in TFA. IBM was his mainframe vendor, and he moved to linux after IBM anounced its support to it.

Re:I'm reading through this and it's interesting.

[Fujisawa Sensei]

Sun, (Java..) and OpenSource Communities learning to cooperate?

Tomcat is the standard for JSP development, and the reference implementation.

JBOSS is J2EE certified.

JSTL implementation was released by the apache group, not Sun

Sun used Struts-EL for JSP 2.0

Xerces was a joint Sun/IBM effort

There's Hibernate which is pretty much going to be EJB 3.0.

X-Doclet has been acepted as the new Metadata format.

Sun is doing a shitload with opensource, they just aren't promoting it.

Re:I'm reading through this and it's interesting.

[StormReaver]

"OK, so if vendor support has gotten better, then which vendors does this CIO recommend?"

The story says that Red Hat and IBM were the vendors used, and that they did very well in the crisis. I'm guessing that he's recommending both.

In any event, the CIO said that he is definitely staying with Red Hat Linux, as it's extremely dependable.

Re:I'm reading through this and it's interesting.

[Hosiah]

Java and Open Source can be extremely good for each other

You are 100.00000% correct, but here's the view from the Open Source end of the table: (a) Sun keeps doing this tap-dance 'We're open standard today, we're proprietary tomorrow, we're the new GNU next week, we're open, we're not, la, la, la.'. We FOSS rebels are used to thinking in terms of black hats and white hats. Shades of grey confuse our AI algorithms. (b) Ever read a Sun liscence to figure out if you can integrate your own free/open code with one of their tools, or use their library to support your application, or write a FOSS application to support Java? Kind of like downing 500 micrograins of acid and then trying to pass the Bar Exam. (c) We have Lisp, Perl, Python, and Ruby just for starters for hybrid languages. Java, cleaner than C++, has some mod attraction, but quite frankly the average Linux distro comes with somewhere around 15 compilers/interpreters for different languages, about three parser generators, the Bash scripting environment, PHP for the web, yada. It's not like we're crying ourselves to sleep at night for want of a programming language. I think there's more motivation for Sun to come to us than for us to come to them. (d) Hey! We all have gcj, our own native Java compiler! I've seen it on my systems from day one, never even popped it open. Neither does anybody else. We're all waiting to either be able to see grey smoke better, for the acid to wear off, or to learn how to pass Bar Exams.

Re:I'm reading through this and it's interesting.

[ghettoimp]

By definition, open source has no ideology. That's the major distinction between the "open source" and "free software" movements.

Re:I'm reading through this and it's interesting.

[mr_tenor]

without caring about any Open Source ideolgies ... The combination is simply outstanding.

The combination won't be so outstanding when it's illegal due to software patents (already likely) and when making it interoperable with closed products and file formats is also illegal (witness the bnetd "no reverse eng" EULA case and the Microsoft XML patents).

Please start caring.

Why didn't he choose Windows?

[team99parody]

Clearly (from the get the facts site) it costs even less than Linux (just kidding) -- so I'm guessing Linux won not because of cost but because of technical superiority.

Any other ideas?

Re:Why didn't he choose Windows?

[HomerJayS]

The obvious answer is that it is an order of magnitude easier to port legacy, core business applications from Unix to Linux. This wasn't some startup with no existing infrastructure.

When making a decision to change OS platforms, you must consider the cost in moving legacy applications over.

Re:Why didn't he choose Windows?

[Marc2k]

Uhhhh....why on Earth would he have chosen Windows? As another poster mentioned, porting Unix->Linux legacy code is worlds easier than to Unix->Windows. But..this decision was about cost, it was never about technical superiority at all. It wasn't that the CIO really badly wanted to switch operating systems, if mainframe Unix would have cost him $2.5 million, he very obviously would have stuck with their existing setup.

Re:Why didn't he choose Windows?

[WindBourne]

Except that the core business was NOT in unix. They were trying to move from TPF to Unix and abandon it. So they still had to move from TPF to Linux and that would be just as difficult as moving from Windows to Linux. In fact, even more so.

Re:Why didn't he choose Windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

"hhhh....why on Earth would he have chosen Windows? As another poster mentioned, porting Unix->Linux legacy code is worlds easier than to Unix->Windows."

Um, neither you nor the other poster you mentioned read the article, did you? They were not switching from unix. They wre switching from TFP. Why you think TFP to Linux is anything like porting Unix to Linux is beyond me.

"But..this decision was about cost, it was never about technical superiority at all. "

Then the grandparent post's question still stands. If Windows has a indeed has a competitive TCO as many people claim, why wasn't it considered. Personally my guess is because Windows was not technically capable, regardless of the cost.

interesting questions raised

[Exter-C]

An interesting question that this article raises for me. Is what intel arch was being used (itanium/x86). For example could the costs have been reduced just by using linux on say a large scale IBM server similar to their other mainframe?.

It also goes to show that just because something is old does not mean its slow..

Re:Well

[Halvard]

Most don't come out of geekdom, rather from business school and worked previously marketing, sales, or some other management area. The don't have the knowledge or skill to be geeks and must rely on them. To make a move like this one, you must have good ones that you trust not just with the business but **with your career**. That's ultimately more important since your family depends on it.

hey Mickey...

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

some guy name "bill" called from redmond. he wants to explain you why linux is more expensive...

Small point of correction

[Alphabet Pal]

Lutz was in command of the alternative to those bright, shiny websites: an expensive, aging global distribution system (GDS) called Galileo.

Actually, all of those bright, shiny websites (Expedia, Travelocity, and Orbitz) rely on a GDS (Sabre, Amadeus, Worldspan or Galileo) to provide their content.

Re:Small point of correction

[sharkb8]

Some rely on all 5 of the Big GDSs.

The Company I worked for did the middleware integration. We basically created the entire backend for Travelocity. Oddly enough, Galileo was one of the first GDSs to move to some form of XML messaging. When I first started wiorking at ??? in 2001, we were having to screen scrape the Windows travel agent terminals and translate everything. And this crap-ass system was written in VB 6.0.

Eventually we rewrote it in VB.Net, but that's not much better for high volume systems. (my team all used Delphi)

Even though we used .Net, we had 6-7 Compaq GS system, with the Alpha 64 bit processors for our backend database. Our 2 big ones were GS320s, with 32 Alphas each. We had to have the Compaq guys come in whenever there was a serious hardware issue, but they had 3 or 4 techs there within a couple of hours. (One weekend night, they were replacing a disc controller, and started the replacement at 12:30 at night. Something idn't take, and I didn't get out of there until 5:00a.m. Sunday morning.)

Needless to say, spending on the travel industry slowed significantly after 9/1, and so a lot of companies in the industry left off more expensive upgrades and development for several years. I imagine we'll be hearing about more significant moves in the next couple years as companies are forced upgrade or die.

Re:Small point of correction

[KlomDark]

Uh, what happened on 9/1? I hadn't heard of that... ;)

Cost breakdown

[alvinrod]

Mainframe: $100 million

Unix: $25 million

Linux: $2.5 million

These numbers were taken from a table in the article. Interestingly enough, the cost if something does break favors Linux as well. From the same table we get that the mainframe solution consists of 4 IBM mainframes, whereas Linux and Unix solutions require around 144 servers for Linux and 100 - 120 servers for Unix. If the hardware goes to hell it's so much easier to replace the single bad part than a mainframe.

Hopefully, more people will begin a transition to open source solutions when they realize it can be successful.

Re:Cost breakdown

[i.r.id10t]

Except IBM mainframes tend to call home and a tech is at your site before you typically know there is a problem... drastic failuers not included.

Re:Cost breakdown

[AKAImBatman]

If the hardware goes to hell it's so much easier to replace the single bad part than a mainframe.

Not to detract from your point, but mainframes don't break as a single piece unless the machine blows up or is otherwise completely destroyed. Big Iron systems are designed with redundant *everything* including motherboards, CPU, memory, network cards, power supplies, and disk drives. If any one part fails, the system will route around it. The part can then be powered down and ejected from the machine. To bring it back up to full capacity, you simply plug in the replacement part and walk away.

In that light, Linux system failures are actually going to be more difficult to repair. However, the cost of repairing a Linux system is far less (disposable box) despite the inherent difficulty. :-)

Re:Cost breakdown

[James McP]

I'm not a Big Iron guy but it's my understanding that main frame hardware does NOT "go to hell" unless someone hits it with a hammer. Repeatedly. And with forethought. They are highly redundant devices, hence the expense.

Re:Cost breakdown

[stienman]

Please note that these are annual costs associated with each system.

If the hardware goes to hell it's so much easier to replace the single bad part than a mainframe.

The reason the mainframe costs so much per year is exactly this issue - first, if something breaks it likely cripples but does not disable the machine. Second, IBM fixes it within four hours or less.

Of course, they are still using IBM hardware, and the reason linux is so expensive (2.5M/Yr) is because they likely have the same type of contract with IBM to fix the Linux hardware. The CIO wouldn't have been able to sell the shareholders on such a system if they didn't have the same kind of hardware support.

-Adam

Re:Cost breakdown

[TinyManCan]

Actually, I would say that drastic failures _ARE_ included. True 'Big Iron' is designed so that massive failures can occur, and processing can still continue.

For example, I have heard of Mainframes that continue running after a projectile has travelled through Processing and Memory sub-units.

The CPUs in the machines sometimes compute the same data twice and compare the results. If they differ, it uses a separate CPU to perform the work.

That same thinking goes through the I/O subsystem as well. Properly configured, a mainframe should be able to survive almost any failure besides a complete loss of power to the entire system, or physical damage to very large sections of the machine (i.e. earthquake takes out datacenter).

Many of these same qualities can be found in Linux clusters, especially ones that are geographically distributed, but it is nice to get the entire package from a single vendor, supported top to bottom. Its the kind of thing that helps the CIO sleep at night, even if it does cost 10-100x more.

Re:Cost breakdown

[twbecker]

Well you can turn that logic around too. When you have 144 boxen, you much more likely to have a failure then when you have 4. But neither that nor your arguement makes any sense. Mainframes as a whole do not go down. Period. A CPU (or 3) can get completely fried and the machine won't miss a beat. Really. And you'll probably have an IBM tech there to fix it before you even know it's happened, since the machine phoned the problem in as soon as it happened. Big iron is expensive no doubt, but if there was really that small of an advantage to it, do you think banks would be paying for it???

Re:Cost breakdown

[Shads]

Lemme rephrase your sentance a bit...

"Not to detract from your point, but clusters don't break as a single piece unless the cluster blows up or is otherwise completely destroyed. Large clustered systems are designed with redundant *everything* including of course motherboards, cpu, memory, network cards, power supplies, and disk drives as each system is independant of the others. If any one part fails the cluster will route around it. The system can then be power down and removed from the cluster. To bring it back up to full capacity you simply plug in the replacement system and walk away.

In that light, mainframe system failures are actually going to be more difficult to repair. However the cost of repairing a linux system is still going to be far less (disposable box)."

Basically a well designed cluster is a mainframe for all intents and purposes.

Re:Cost breakdown

[ArsonSmith]

Mainframes may be dual and even quad redundant, but you linux cluster is 100-120 times redundant. With blades you could be talking about seconds of interuption to minimal portions of the entire application. If done right there should be no user presevable service interuption.

Re:Cost breakdown

[Master of Transhuman]

It should be obvious to anyone with a brain that a cluster is designed as a cluster for the exact same reason a mainframe is designed as a mainframe: availability and power.

There is NO significant difference between a cluster and a mainframe except one: economy of scale in cost.

And by that I mean that the components of a cluster cost FAR less than the components of a mainframe - which is why a cluster that offers as much or more power than a mainframe costs as little as TEN PERCENT of a mainframe.

Studies have shown that a mainframe that runs ONE application can cost $14 MILLION for the ONE application. You only get economies of scale from a mainframe if you run MANY applications on it, or you can run hundreds or thousands of copies of the SAME application (a la LAMP Web sites on an IBM mainframe.)

I think it was Schlumberger or one of those oil-related companies that replaced a $10 million IBM mainframe with a Linux cluster for $500,000 and GOT THREE TIMES THE PROCESSING POWER. Do the math, folks - three times the processing power for 5% of the cost.

THAT'S why Linux on Intel is replacing UNIX and proprietary systems. And that isn't going to stop.

As to the question of Windows, show me a study that says any size Windows cluster can match ANY mainframe.

And THAT'S why Linux will bury Windows in the enterprise data center AFTER it buries UNIX there.

Re:Cost breakdown

[Anonymous Coward]

In that light, Linux system failures are actually going to be more difficult to repair. However, the cost of repairing a Linux system is far less (disposable box) despite the inherent difficulty. :-)

More difficult? Hardware failures are primarily power supply and hard disk problems. Five grand will buy you a nice rackmount dual xeon box from Dell (and support for Redhat Advanced Server) with a redundant hotswap raid array, redundant hotswap power supplies, and hotspare ram.

The box will even send you out-of-band pages/email when failures occur. Keep some spares on site and your hardware reliability will approach 100% for that box (not to mention the reliability of the cluster as a whole). Dell's next-day onsite service for hardware replacement is pretty cheap, and their four hour rapid response service isn't that expensive.

Re:Cost breakdown

[advocate_one]

you can spread a cluster across multiple sites to gain safety from a single disaster like a fire or plane crash or some twat putting his JCB blade through the power cable (happened to me, was 2 days before the power came back up, he'd hit a 14,000 volt main cable, ruined his day permanently)... try doing that with a single mainframe...

Switching

[g0dsp33d]

I switched my desktop and saved $90. Seriously though, do any slashdoters have experience switching their companies computers to, or even away from linux?

Re:Switching

[sloanster]

Of course there are people in this audience who have experience switching corporate computing platforms to linux - I've been working with a number of companies who have moved, or are in the process of moving services to linux, not only from old school risc unix systems, but also from high-maintenance microsoft windows platforms.

I'm sure my experiences are just like those of a lot of other sys admins here - nothing surprising, just a quiet evolution that is working quite well.

On the subject of linux to other OSes, there was a migration of some apps here from linux to HPUX about 4 years ago (mainly a political stunt, done just to make a statement) but the manager responsible for the move has been demoted, and the apps in question are being migrated back to linux.

Re:Switching

[The_Wilschon]

My company has its own distribution of Linux. Aging? oh heavens yes. Fermilinux is based on Redhat 7.3.

I wish we could upgrade to a more modern one (ie based on glibc6 rather than libc5) if only for the sake of being able to customize my own work environment. As it is, if I want to add something that is not already on my office machine (I don't have root, obviously) I have to compile it, hope that the old libs don't break it, hack at it if they do, and install it to my home directory. Quite annoying.

But, I'm very much on the low end of the totem pole (I'm an undergrad, with grad students, phd's, technicians, etc. all over my head. Plus I'm only working here for the summer.) so it is not likely I'll have any say in an upgrade.

I think that security is the main reason to stick with the old stuff. They've got the hell patched out of everything, and then it's all been gone over with a magnifying glass and dentist's tools... Which presumably makes it secure. I'm skeptical, but then I'm always skeptical of security. I'm no security pro though, so my opinion doesn't wind up counting much.

Re:Switching

[itwerx]

do any slashdoters have experience switching their companies computers to, or even away from linux?

As an IT consultant I switch my clients to Linux whenever it makes sense. Usually it's a case where they have a handful of Windows boxes that were poorly implemented by some other firm. I look at what they have and if it's easier to move file/print/DB/web/email etc to a single Linux box than it is to clean up the existing clusterf*ck then I do it. And they are always happy! Not to mention small shops are usually pretty tight-fisted and like to have a couple decent boxes freed up to replace old workstations with. :)

Re:Switching

[tylernt]

Can you compile and run UML? Inside of a UML you can have root.

I looked a little bit and I don't see that you need root on the host system to compile and run UML, but I didnt read too close so I could be wrong.

Spread the word!

[bogaboga]

[...] Mickey Lutz did something that most CIOs, even today, would consider unthinkable: He moved a critical part of his IT infrastructure from the mainframe and Unix to Linux. For Lutz, the objections to Linux, regarding its technical robustness and lack of vendor support, had melted enough to justify the gamble.'[...] His organization saved 90% in costs in so doing.

Now, let's get prepared to rebut any Microsoft officials whenever they talk about the common "Total Cost of Ownership" as far as Linux is concerned.

Re:Spread the word!

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunatly, the comparison was between Linux and a propriatory mainframe system. Microsoft officials will just say 'Well, we could have done it just as cheap'.

And knowing the wacky discounts MS give when they want to get their foot in the door, they could well be telling the truth.

Re:Spread the word!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, let's get prepared to rebut any Microsoft officials whenever they talk about the common "Total Cost of Ownership" as far as Linux is concerned.

With anecdotal evidence?

Perhaps this is not a good idea.

Re:Spread the word!

[afd8856]

Sure! :-) Windows 2003 Server license, that's about 300$, multiplied by 144, 43.200$, right?

And who says windows needs TCO? Any guy in the office can admin a windows box...

Re:Spread the word!

[Chess_the_cat]

Now, let's get prepared to rebut any Microsoft officials whenever they talk about the common "Total Cost of Ownership" as far as Linux is concerned.

You're right, the debate is over. There is nothing left to be said. This anectode about a guy switching from Unix to Linux has finally solved the question: Which costs more? Windows or Linux? I heard that Bill has read this article and has already begun nailing some planks to the front door .

Re:Spread the word!

[afidel]

Compared to the millions spent on even the Linux solution it's a non-issue. Hell the support cost per box is probably some large fraction of that cost per year, no matter who you go to for support. Hell the cost of one employee to admin any solution will be some decent multiple of that per year (even if you were only paying the person $43k/year they would cost at least twice that with taxes and crappy benifits.)

Re:Spread the word!

[Anonymous Coward]

Then there's the $20 million spent trying to fit a square into a circle (ie port from mainframe to winblows).

Because we all know it's not a matter of buying your OS licenses, there's a little more than that.

Re:Spread the word!

[ArsonSmith]

If you look, these figures were sponserd by Linus Torvolds. Looks like this Mr Lutz is in Linus's back pocket.

Re:Spread the word!

[john_uy]

Now, let's get prepared to rebut any Microsoft officials whenever they talk about the common "Total Cost of Ownership" as far as Linux is concerned.

we can make any conclusions about this. they just transferred from mainframes and unix boxes to linux. it would be better if they transferred to windows them transferred to linux so there can be a better comparison. and besides, there may be instances when microsoft software may have better tco than oss and vice-versa. i don't think there is a law (as in scientific laws) that states that oss is always cheaper in terms of tco than closed source software.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

holy crap you're an idiot.

The risks and the rewards

[AB3A]

Like most critics, I'm not good at leading large companies. But I know good leadership when I see it. This guy Lutz has his head bolted on right.

The first thing most CIOs usually throw at their workforce is not to re-invent anything. If a product exists off the shelf at a reasonable cost, there are lots of disadvantages for taking the risk of inventing another one and few advantages if you succeed.

However, most of us workers have known that the "big iron" mainframe technologies of yesteryear are starting to "rust." It's getting difficult to find technical help who understand this stuff reasonably well. That brings me to the second point: Follow the technology market. The people will be there.

I suspect that in the not too distant future, many big-iron mainframers are going to be asking theselves whether the many millions they're spending are a good ROI. Open source databases and distributed computing are starting to look awfully attractive.

It's scary from a CIO's position because the old systems are working, even if they're not well understood any more. They're leaping from the systems they know, toward a high cost potential boondoggle. This guy apparently knew how to hire and retain good technical help, he knew how to organize that help, and he knew how to keep them focused on the goal.

Most leaders aren't that good. All too many businesses operate by habit. Only the red tape holds them together. Those organizations won't be making this leap until a certain critical mass has been reached to convince them one by one to make the effort.

We should be doing everything we can to encourage others like Lutz to push these efforts. This is how you really evangelize Linux. And when all this is over, the desktop will be an afterthought.

Re:The risks and the rewards

[chris_mahan]

I'm going to Amen this comment, because frankly, it's leadership ability that makes of breaks large transitions like Lutz's.

And I'm not talking about just the CIO, I'm also talking VPs, directors and managers. If only 30% of your management understands the way open-source software are written, don't jump to linux.

Of course, if the Almighty Board does not retain a top notch CIO, the transition will never take place. Also, the company will not be in the top 10% performers in their industry.

This is why hiring a good CIO should be paramount at process-heavy companies. What makes a good CIO?

--Good understanding of modern technology.
--Good relationship with vendors
--Good mentoring and motivational skills
--Excellent ability to recognize and promote proactive managers
--Guts
--Excellent ability to explain the above to other C** and finally:
--Execution.

Because vision without the ability to execute remains a pie-in-the-sky dream.

And a good CIO should really be earning the equivalent of the CEO's salary, because he can make or break the company.

A Bold Move

[endeavour31]

An interesting read. But very interesting for what was left unsaid as well. There was a fair amount of pain associated with the switch - aggravated by rolling out a new application simultaneously. The slowdowns and the associated costs are glossed over but I wonder how the business side feels about this change to only 25% of the entire infrastructure.

The time window seems fairly broad as well. No one disputes that lots of cheaper intel servers can do the same job as big iron. THe question is how many does it take and what happens with the applications involved.

Quite telling is the comment that they needed every bit of support possible. Although it is great that one CIO bit the bullet here....there is an ominous side to this story which means that few others will follow suit.

Re:A Bold Move

[dmaxwell]

There will prove to be right and wrong ways to make transistions like this. The catch we won't learn what those all are until a few more companies do things like this. Yeah, there are some downsides to United's experience with this but on balance this is more good news than bad. A "few others" following suit would be all it takes layout all of the pitfalls and benefits. In a few more years, stories about this kind of switchover will be boring too.

Imagine...

[RoadkillBunny]

...how much money he would save if he moved to Microsoft!

aww

[Pyrrus]

I was hoping to see a "Windows has lower TCO than Linux" ad that slashdot runs for Microsoft when I clicked the article.

Oh no

[mcc]

Most C** are idiots.

And I thought C# was bad enough. This naming scheme is getting out of hand :(

His Reward?

[Nom du Keyboard]

His organization saved 90% in costs in so doing.

But did he get a raise? Say about half of what he saved them.

Re:His Reward?

[AKAImBatman]

But did he get a raise? Say about half of what he saved them

Most executives have bonus programs in place that encourages them to take steps like this. In some companies, the amount of the bonus is directly proportional to the amount of money saved or earned. The only problem with these programs is that they often encourage execs to take measures such as drastic layoffs even thought those layoffs will hurt the business in the long term.

Re:His Reward?

[WaxParadigm]

Did he get a raise??? Did he get a "cut" of the savings???

Come on, these are one of probably 2-3 CORE job responsibilities of CIOs and anyone in IT. It is OUR JOB to do things efficiently, and do them more efficiently in the future (so there is capital and resources to do other things).

This guy's reward is that the company he saved money is going to succeed, instead of die, and probably has $$ to give him, his staff, and other parts of the company raises now and in the years to come...instead of going belly-up and leaving him and many others without that income.

So, this guy is and will be getting his raises, performance bonuses, etc...but to say that he should get half, or they should just distribute half of the savings among the people in IT to make them feel good just doesn't get business and economics. They will get some of the money but much of the money needs to be re-invested (to do things like this for the rest of the company), given to shareholders (cause they own the company and expect return), and used in several other ways to ensure this company continues to exist, grow, and turn a profit (so it's employees and shareholders can continue to get what they deserve).

IT is not about hitting the jackpok by saving a company $$ once...it's about continual savings, capability, and effenciency.

This might be extra-ordinary performance...but it is what should be expected of IT and the CIO.

Why do you assume Mainframe = Cluster?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mainframe != Cluster.

The CPU speeds are very low on those things.
The advantage is that the CPUs can get the data they needs very quickly so it can do a whole bunch of transactions at once.

The main mistake is changing everything together

[iabervon]

"In hindsight," says Lutz, "we shouldn't have tried to cut over to a new infrastructure at the same time we were deploying a new software application. It was too much at once."

They found that their Linux servers couldn't support the new application they had deployed at the same time. That doesn't mean it's less capable than the mainframes they replaced: they didn't even try running the higher-load application against the mainframes.

They should have first ported their servers to Linux on the mainframes, then switched them to Linux on clusters, then sent out new software that they could force back to the old behavior, then supported the new software in general.

That way, they'd have been able to isolate the problems more easily (which really turned out to be that the new application generated extreme peak loads, and nothing to do with Linux per se, aside from that they managed to improve the Linux performance to deal with it) and keep things stable while they fixed the issues.

Re:Not good from my experience

[thomasa]

Another flamebait from the idiot stephanie. This exact article was posted the other day. Please mod it down. Bill. Go Away!

Re:Not good from my experience

[Anonymous Coward]

wow
for all the different sites i have seen that "story" or something nearly identical on. i have to wonder how you could be around the *nix cummunity soo much and still not have a clue how to get everything set up, and not be aware the ATI has shit for support in *nix.

this "story" is obviously copy/paste flaimbait

Re:I'm reading through this and it's int eresting.

[vidarh]

The article did mention that Redhat and IBM were both part of the cutover team, so I guess they were the vendors.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, yeah. CEO's are dumb, CIO's are dumb, PHB's are dumb.

Notice how they're probably all making more money in a year than you'll make in a lifetime, though? Guess there's something to being stupid after all.

Or maybe, just maybe, you're dealing with your frustration toward those who are truly successful through cynicism. But hey, I could be wrong.

More specifics, please.

[jbn-o]

Please be more specific about what ideological goals you're referring to.

Re:Not good from my experience

[Otter]

What you need to do is get another machine (it doesn't have to be top-of-the-line) solely to experiment on. This machine is called in CompSci circles a "testbed". When testing is done and you are sure everything works (and are confident that it will stay that way) then, and only then, install that program on the computers in use.

First, you're feeding a troll.

Second, that's not exactly the most convincing bit of Linux advocacy I've ever heard...

Re:Not good from my experience

[Anonymous Coward]

Now even the *trolls* are getting duped on /.

And this one wasn't even particularly funny, so it's a total waste of bits.

Re:Not good from my experience

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen a carbon copy of this post...seemingly from the same person at least one other time. Go away troll...

You forgot a line

[jd]

A CIO who takes a "chance" with Linux: Priceless

Seriously, the biggest problem with mainframes is that switching them off is a big problem. These are not boxes you can easily - or safely - reboot, if there is a problem. There usually isn't, because the hardware is usually of very high calibre and massively redundant, but scheduled maintenance of, say, an Amdahl or a (when they existed) a Prime was not a trivial affair.

"Routine" maintenance wasn't much better - DEC would charge the Earth (and Mars) to swap tapes on even a humble VAX, and apparently had contracts with some places (such as my old University in Glamorgan, Wales) where absolutely nobody else was permitted to conduct such delicate operations.

This meant that no sane person ever did anything, if they could possibly help it. Which is one big reason that Big Iron started sliding into unpopularity the moment clusters started appearing.

The other problem with mainframes is that the manufacturer usually has the purchaser over a barrel. You can't exactly walk to Fry's and buy a new RAID controller for a CM-5 Connection Machine, or a new processor card for that Amdahl mainframe in the corner. The manufacturers know they have an absolute monopoly on parts, so charge the absolute maximum the market will bear.

For large clusters, the situation is very different. You probably wouldn't buy commodity off-the-shelf parts, if you could help it, but you COULD. That keeps the price somewhat checked on the higher-end higher-quality parts, because you can do fail-over. If you have twice the reliability, but over twice the price, it becomes more effective to use redundancy and hot-swapping.

Software is another important consideration. If you upgrade the software on a mainframe, you upgrade the WHOLE mainframe. If you upgrade a cluster, then so long as there is backwards compatibility, you can roll out the upgrade a node at a time, keeping the system as a whole running.

True, you don't usually do major brain-surgery on an IBM mainframe, as IBM isn't stupid enough to make severe enough changes to AIX to force a major overhaul on a regular basis, but (a) that limits how AIX can evolve (which will eventually kill it), and (b) major overhauls are a part of the computer business and do happen - you can't avoid them.

In today's world, though, it doesn't make sense to use ultra-specialized hardware and software. It isn't cost-effective and it isn't maintainable. A glance at a number of mainframe manufacturers show many have SOME kind of Linux offering, which (to me) shows they feel the same way. Eventually, Big Iron will become just a very fast component in a much larger, much more powerful super-cluster, rather than something significant in and of itself.

Re:You forgot a line

[mmkkbb]

True, you don't usually do major brain-surgery on an IBM mainframe, as IBM isn't stupid enough to make severe enough changes to AIX to force a major overhaul on a regular basis, but (a) that limits how AIX can evolve (which will eventually kill it), and (b) major overhauls are a part of the computer business and do happen - you can't avoid them.

Um, IBM mainframes don't run AIX. They run z/OS, Linux, z/VM, TPF, or VSE. IBM has been able to make huge changes to these OSs and still maintain compatibility.

Re:Not good from my experience

[2$ Crack Whore]

I agree, BUT 95% of these problems stem from Microsoft having a stranglehold. Think about it. If you were a soft/hardware developer and you are trying to make a profit, you're going to develop your product on the most ubiquitous platform and only consider secondary platforms if market share (potential profit) warrants this. It's simple economics.

Linux/BSD variants have come a LONG way considering most of the functionality/drivers has been either creatively engineered by the community or obtained by lobbying vendors (resulting in drivers that only provide the most basic functionality).

Boost the installed base and provide demand for functionality in your OS, and vendors will respond.

Unfortunately these problems are difficult to solve because they are both a cause and a symptom of themselves. Not to mention the very active efforts of Microsoft to thwart any meaningful attempts at the adoption of alternate systems.

Just my 0.02$

Linux on Intel vs. what?

[oldenuf2knowbetter]

The article seems to be comparing a $100 million implementation on a thing called UNIX against a $2.5 million dollar implementation using Linux on Intel. What's a UNIX? And why does it cost so much? A clearer definition of the hardware platforms being compared would be quite useful.

Additionally, in my opinion, the guy should have been canned by Cendant the moment United Airlines was off the air for 45 minutes. If YOU were responsible for this serious a screwup would you still have a job? Probably not.

Re:Linux on Intel vs. what?

[thrashbluegrass]

late 90's, unix:

pretty good chance it was solaris

second best guess would be AIX

Re:Linux on Intel vs. what?

[Anonymous Coward]

At most large companies, top brass are NOT fired. That is too hard on the stock price and the board of trustees will not put up with it.

Instead they are put in charge of special projects, 'special' as in stuck in a deadend position with nothing to do and nobody reporting to them. This is followed by an announcement the next quarter that said CxO has left to pursue other interests. Wink wink.

Re:Not good from my experience

[chill]

I installed WinXP Pro SP2 on a machine at my house the other day. Not difficult, and it took a while to get all of the little extra we use: Java, Flash, Adobe Reader, PDF Creator, Firefox + plugins, nVidia drivers, wireless card drivers, etc.

However, the next step was to go to Windows Update and apply all critical & security patches. It did and wanted to reboot.

Then refused to reboot, even into Safe Mode. WinUpdate had hosed the system but good.

After searching around I found that one of the updates installed a bad agp440.sys file and I needed to boot into the Recovery Console to fix it. After that I could boot into Windows but it took another 10 minutes and 2 reboots to get it to allow me to install proper video drivers so it would work.

It doesn't play DVDs, is flakey with my wireless connection and I had to hunt all over the net for drivers to get everything to work. With my Linux set up, it all worked right out of the box, except for me wanting the latest nVidia drivers.

The kids are still whining at me to put Linux back and get rid of crap XP. The only reason it is there is because there is no Linux capable Shockwave plugin.

Conclusion: WinXP is a convoluted mess that takes too much effort and has too many limitations.

Re:Not good from my experience

[dfiguero]

same thing as yesterday!

Here's the rebuttal:

Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Funny)
by NoMoreNicksLeft (516230) Alter Relationship on Thursday June 30, @03:01PM (#12952440)
(http://24.125.88.66/ | Last Journal: Saturday June 04, @12:50PM)
I tried switching the family over to JSF attack jets over the summer
vacation and the wails of terror, utter anxiety, and lack of any flight training whatsoever was enough to crash the jets straight into the ground.
So why all the troubles?
Afterall JSF pilots love to tell stories of how the JSF is so
much better than a donkey cart with a broken wheel and they would never try to fly across the ocean in one.
My conclusion after seeing real people in a real average Jane setting
crash and burn after being dropped in the pilot's seat midair is that the JSF advocates are just plain lying
because the JSF is really a step backwards for people used to using
technology several centuries behind what it should be.

To make this short and simple, virtually NOTHING worked properly in the JSF.
Telling the JSF to turn left and swatting it with your hand did nothing, it would not listen.
Stuffing oats and barley into the fuel tank did not refuel it. In fact, the jet technician said I caused 100s of 1000s of $$$ worth of damage!
I tried to nail a proper shoe onto the jet turbine, but the jet-grade aluminum just gouged.
I applied salve to where we attached the harness, but the weird metallic lesions would not heal.
We then took the JSF to a vetrinarian, but he said he did not treat JSFs.
I was unable to tie the reins up to the hitching post.
And it goes on and on for pages,but the bottom line is that the JSF lasted about 3 days in my house before I ditched it and went back to
my donkey cart with a broken wheel.

Conclusion is that the JSF is a birds nest of confusion. The JSF seems
like it might be good until you actually try and fly it and then it
shows it's ugliness, slowness and instability.

Why on earth ANYONE would use the JSF for personal transportation is beyond me.
--
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars) More like 86 chars.

Re:Not good from my experience

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

MOD THIS TROLL DOWN!

I tried switching the family over to Linux machines over the summer vacation and the objections from the other family members was more than enough to send all 7 machines right back to Windows ME, Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

No one with any intelligence at all would switch all of 7 machines over to a new, untested OS at once. This is a troll.

Re:Not good from my experience

[alewar]

It's ok to stick to windows/osx if you can afford the licences and you're willing to. If someday you don't have money to buy a licence you can ask someone with experience in Linux for help installing it and give it a try again.

I, for instance, only buy hardware supported by Linux, so I don't have your problems, problems that will happen until the vendors add support to Linux.

Linux is not magic and doesn't automatically support any new hardware that may appear, someone must sit down and with a lot of patience make the proper drivers, because vendors *don't*.

You can install it and say: ok. a lot of things *do* work, and it is for free. With less money than you save in MS et al. licences you can buy a new linux-supported printer, graphic card, and a long hardware etc.

I use Ogg and not mp3, but nevertheless I never experienced skipping playing audio or video.

Re:Not good from my experience

[Bent Mind]

Stephanie is nothing more than a FUDBOT: The same message was posted yesterday.

Here's the ARMY!

[Tsu Dho Nimh]

"The issue is that you're working without a safety net. If things go really wrong, there's no backup army of specially trained techs to run in and fix things."

They had serious problems, but this sounds like a sufficient safety net: "a 40- to 50-person cutover team of IBM, Red Hat and Cendant engineers brought the problems under control by throwing more servers into the mix."

Re:The main mistake is changing everything togethe

[Tsu Dho Nimh]

"They should have first ported their servers to Linux on the mainframes"

Yeah ... like a 1970s era mainframe could run Linux! They could have LEASED enough Linux servers to do a full test run. Still, until you actually do the cutover, it's hard to really know what will break with a complex app.

Re:Not good from my experience

[alienfluid]

of course, your experience speaks for everyone, doesn't it? last time i checked, more devices were natively supported in XP than in any linux distribution. just because you fcked up doesn't mean the product is broken.

Linux and the Intel Architecture??

[jjmartin540]

Why is it that the article only thinks/talks about Intel and Linux? Linux has been to ported to almost every architecture imaginable e.g. PPC x86_64 ARM m68k, and probably more exotic architectures a well. For that matter why isn't AMD considered?

Re:Linux and the Intel Architecture??

[Spirckle]

Patience, patience.

Remember this is an article targeted to top brass; they can only handle so much information at one time.

Please do not overload the Chief Information Officer with too much information.

Should've picked FreeBSD

[mi]

Would've saved even more...

It may not support all of the latest sound and video cards, but it sure makes a better server.

What happened to his bonus, though.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think a CIO managing a $100million/year empire is entitled to far far larger bonuses than guys running $2.5million shops.

I bet a year later he's kicking himself from being the most important (visible to the Board because for every 1% he saved on that $100mil makes or breaks the quarterly reults) guy in the company to a nobody.

Inexperience shows

[Anonymous Coward]

I find this article somehow amusing. Before becoming CIO at Cendant Travel, Lutz was at PHH which wrote one-off customized web applications. To Lutz it didn't matter if you wrote the same application over and over, he did not seem to appreciate a systems approach to development. He was more apt to approve of the "hack it and shove it out the door" method. Guess that's why he has since been put in charge of 'strategic projects' which at Cendant is tantamount to being put out to pasture. Last I heard he left to 'pursue other interests'.

Not good generally. This post originally in 2003

[delire]

via Stephanie Klugg Aug 15 2003, 6:33 pm

Someone is obviously paid to do this.

Whatever ...

[Bwah]

This article is badly focused. Their porting problems are not with the Linux platform. Their problems are related to lousy application architecture. (Or they would seem to be. Since I have not seen what they did I really can't say.)

Yes, distributing software is HARD, but it's something that can be modeled ahead of time with suprising fidelity. That's the difference between engineering and hacking ... we do the up front analysis, and should have a pretty damn good idea that it will actually work when we build it. It sounds like this system might have been hacked.

This seems to be a common issue and I don't understand why CIO types can't outgrow it. If you build the software correctly the platform becomes more or less irrelevant (E.g, Linux, BSD, SCO, LynxOS, whatever.) Why is this so difficult to understand? I've personally DONE this for several large systems (albeit not as large as GDS) and the guys in charge of the port are always locked into moving to a specific hardware/software platform. Maybe it just comes from an olde skool mainframe oriented mindset.

Unless, of course, this was truly a port and not a new architecture. I which case I have nothing but respect for these guys. It's always a miracle when those work at all ...

A few words from a TPF programmer

[UltimaGuy]

The Fares application and infrastructure represent just 10 percent of the Galileo computing platform. The rest houses the massive collection of flight information for every airline, every route in the world, written in a 1970s-era mainframe language called the Transaction Processing Facility (TPF). "Unlike today's operating systems, TPF was designed almost exclusively for speed," says Wiseman.
I am one of the programmers who develop for TPF. What is mentioned here, the part about TPF being designed for speed is 100% correct. It is still the fastest OS available IMO...

Most of the development projects are done only in Assembly, and even in that we generally concentrate a lot on minimizing the code base and MIPS. There is no way any other architecture now, which includes Linux, Unix, BSD's can compete with TPF in terms of raw power ... that raw power being speed. During top loads the system easily handles 4000 messages per second ... which will choke off any other OS I know of.

And there is another new development in the horizon for TPF ... apache has/is being ported to it ... a web server in TPF will then be every WebAdmin's dreams ... as it can never be slashdotted :-)

That said, I am really hapy that Linux is improving it's position in the market. I would've been much happier if this was in the desktop rather than the backend server .

Re:A few words from a TPF programmer

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm glad you posted. That was interesting.

Re:A few words from a TPF programmer

[jsrlepage]

And there is another new development in the horizon for TPF ... apache has/is being ported to it ... a web server in TPF will then be every WebAdmin's dreams ... as it can never be slashdotted :-)

sounds like a challenge.

CAD

[pipingguy]

The moment that major CAD software operates reliably on Linux I'll start to pay very close attention. I said *major* software, not some homegrown thing that can draw only lines and circles.

Re:CAD

[burnin1965]

If you want major then you should be looking at Pro/Engineer from PTC. I haven't used it but a student co-op I was supervising used it at the University of Utah and thought I would like it. It looks awesome, and expensive.
http://www.ptc.com/go/wildfire/index.htm

The next logical choice would likely be Varicad. They have a demo version you can download and play with. I've used this and its not bad, about on the same level as AutoCAD. When I get around to buying a CAD application for linux this will likely be it.
http://www.varicad.com/

And things are always changing. It may be worth a look to google around for current offerings. A good start would be here:
http://www.tech-edv.co.at/lunix/CADlinks.html

burnin

Re:CAD

[wobblie]

Uh, that's very "desktopy" type shit there. It isn't going to happen anytime soon since the cost savings would not be so dramatic.

The really high end (expensive) stuff - scientific work - across almost all industries, has already gone linux. Autodesk and Bentley will take a while, but Landmark, Schlumberger et. al. have gone linux big time.

No, Linux saved that guy's a$$.

[khasim]

Like most critics, I'm not good at leading large companies. But I know good leadership when I see it. This guy Lutz has his head bolted on right.

I'll have to disagree with that. He made a good choice in going to Linux from Unix, but he did so is such a fucked up way that it was only Linux's technological goodness that saved him from being a poster boy for Microsoft's "Linux sucks" campaign.

Here, from TFA:

The decision not to focus more on testing came back to haunt them.

The CIO decided not to TEST the system correctly?

Frantic calls began coming in from some of the 44,000 travel agency locations in 116 countries that were unable to access Fares.

Their customers cannot access their new Linux system!

Lutz would not comment on the financial losses incurred by United or Galileo during the downtimes.

They were LOSING money with their new Linux system.

"In hindsight," says Lutz, "we shouldn't have tried to cut over to a new infrastructure at the same time we were deploying a new software application. It was too much at once."

This guy made novice-level mistakes and it was only because Linux is so good that this became a huge success rather than a terrible failure.

Rather than falling back to the old platform at the first signs of trouble and reworking the new one, the engineers always thought the answer was around the corner.

You always have a back-out plan. Always.

This guy took a huge risk ... screwed it up royally ... and was saved by IBM, Red Hat and Linux.

And the Linux system STILL saves him $$$MILLIONS$$$ every year and OUTPERFORMS his old system.

It's one thing when you're a genius CIO who plans and test for every contingency and deploys a working Linux system.

It's a completely different thing when you don't BUT YOU STILL SUCCEED BECAUSE OF LINUX.

This story is important because it shows the average CIO that, even if you aren't a genius and you DO make mistakes, Linux can STILL save you barrels of money and make you LOOK like a genius.

Re:No, Linux saved that guy's a$$.

[Seraphim_72]

Look, you have three ways to trasition. -

• Pure cut - which they did
• metered out - ie 10% then 20% ...
• parallel systems

This gut chose the first one - linux had nothing to do with it. If he had gone to a new propriatry system - the SAME thing would have happened. Linux is only a bit player here.

Sera

Linux is for wankers

[Anonymous Coward]

Tried to install SQL-Ledger to see if it was an alternative to Quicken.

After many hours, I gave up. Given that "production quality" Linux software contains installation instructions that say, in one step:

Install OBA

and the instructions to install OBA are a copy of the SQL-Ledger instructions, including the same line that says "Install OBA," I say "Screw it."

Linux is fine for wankers who want to spend their weekends screwing around with it. There are people who screw around with getting old cars to run, changing brands of vacuum tubes on their preamps, or trading matchbook covers. Fine. Everyone needs a hobby.

But for people who actually want to use a computer to do something productive, rather than using it to waste time, Linux simply doesn't work.

Sure, there will be some success stories as people convert to it. After all, having to learn JCL parameters was a waste of time too. But eventually, it too will fade, as the cost of maintaining such a mess consumes them.

Microsoft will win in the end, not because their products are good, but because when the day is done, people can get their jobs done using them. That still isn't true for Linux as long as the quality of products resembles what you find at a flea market.

What are these guys smoking?

[NerveGas]

There are a lot of things in the article that make me think that these guys are throwing a bit of smoke and confusion - or just don't know what they're doing. Here's one example:

According to Lutz, the number of possible combinations of flights and prices for all the airline carriers between two major cities has been estimated by researchers at MIT to be 10 to the 30th power.

Sure, if you want *every single* combination. Yes, I could fly from Denver to Las Vegas via Miami, New York, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angelas, Houston, Salt Lake, and *then* to Las Vegas - with up to 7 day layovers in every city - but that's just silly.

But by assuming just a few simple sanity checks (such as fewer than X stopovers, change carriers fewer than Y times, longest layover no more than Z hours, or "dont-use-puddle-jumper=1"), I would imagine that you could pull that number from 10^30 down to no more than 10^3 - perhaps less than 10^2. When you trim the size of your data set by 27 or 28 orders of magnitude before you even start your processing, then suddenly those 700 or so transactions/second start looking a lot easier.

Then, of course, there's yet another old standby of people needing lots of computations: Don't repeat your work. Insert a machine or process that watches each incoming request, and caches the results in a lookup table for future use. Yes, there are implementation challenges (such as marking entries as dirty when route information changes), but $50k in programming could save them more than $1m in hardware.

steve

144 linux servers from one main frame

[SonOfMan]

At 400w a piece, that will make for one nice electric bill; I wonder why they didn't put linux on the mainframe.

Re:144 linux servers from one main frame

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the max rated draw of the power supply; actual draw will probably be at about half.

I see your point, though. Power costs us more than bandwidth with a lot of our customers.

Re:Not good generally. This post originally in 200

[Anonymous Coward]

If this is the same Stephanie then it is none other that Gary flatfish Stewart who has been trolling COLA for years. Since Dec 2000 in fact. You will only find references to his earlist posts as he X-No-Archives them. His particular pathology is to post aliases composed of smutty wordpuns.

I do apologies that he's now discovered slashdot. I'll try and up his medication. Also take these aliases into consideration.

Richard C. Hymen aka Stephanie Klugg aka Patricia Fitzhenry aka Mike Cox aka Aftab Mooshoo Bong Singh aka Thomas J. Crapper aka Karen Livermore aka Sid Fidler aka elenacurva aka Peggy Wanker aka Peggy Wanka ..

PTC is ported to Linux.

[PotatoHead]

I personally hate them, but their software is powerful and considered major CAD software.

The mainstream vendors, (Solidworks, Solid Edge, Inventor, et al.) are all married to the win32 API. For them, it will be a good long while just like Microsoft likes it.

However the big three, Dassaut, PTC, UGS all run on UNIX today, with one PTC Linux port. The others all claim too many support issues. (copout, support one distro and let your users sort it out.)

It's coming, but slowly.

Re:Not good from my experience

[chill]

of course, your experience speaks for everyone, doesn't it? last time i checked, more devices were natively supported in XP than in any linux distribution. just because you fcked up doesn't mean the product is broken.

No, it doesn't speak for everyone. My post was meant to highlight that exact fact to the parent.

I think the number of devices supported "out of the box" by major Linux distros and WinXP is about the same. I've had LOTS better luck with Linux. Of course, it is a moot point -- the first thing I do in many cases on both systems is update to the latest drivers.

As far as screwing up, no I didn't. The product IS broken. It was a standard Intel MB, nVidia GEForce 5200, stock everything. XP goes on, then SP2 then wireless drivers then Windows Update and it borks. No other software no nothing. And I couldn't even boot to Safe Mode. That, by definition, is BROKEN.

It was fixable, and to be fair it has worked fine before on half-a-dozen other systems and I rarely install the OS so this problem is only possible once a year or so.

My point to the parent was no software works 100% out of the box. I've dealt with dozens of people (I'm in customer support) who bitch and scream at XP because it doesn't support all their hardware or software. I've seen people fight for days trying to get stuff that was working in Win98 to work in XP.

-Charles

Re:The main mistake is changing everything togethe

[mikolas]

They could have their partitions running in modern mainframe environment first (the original stuff was from IBM so this is a no-brainer as IBM's mainframes are really well backward compatible, even on word length issues and such), then add Linux to the mix. After that, porting on Linux/x86(-64) would have been trivial.

This has been part of IBM's strategy for a while: run Linux from mainframe to the cheapest possible x86 hardware. The benefit? Single unified programming environment lets customers gradually migrate applications to hardware of choice. It's not that unusual to see Linux on zSeries as it makes perfect sense for consolidation in cases where VMWare ESX Server just does not cut it. The bottom line? Efficient IT operations management when system administration is focused on one operative environment (+ some mandatory Windows backoffice stuff).

Re:Not good from my experience

[deanoaz]

>> I tried switching the family over to Linux machines over the summer vacation and the objections from the other family members was more than enough to send all 7 machines right back to Windows ME, Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

>No one with any intelligence at all would switch all of 7 machines over to a new, untested OS at once. This is a troll.

Not only that, but what kind of person would admit that someone in their own family was running Windows ME (and wanted to go back to it)!

"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history - with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila." - Mitch Ratliffe

Re:Not good from my experience

[waferhead]

I'm not certain this guy is trolling---
Given what he describes, it's a realistic scenario, in that He didn't do ANY research etc.

If you walk into something totally unfamiliar/ blind, the expected happens. You step in something or worse.

Kudos for using Ghost, btw. I use a Knoppix CD and partimage. YMMV.

He also doesn't indicate how long ago this "event" occurred... Things have improved greatly in recent years.

Also... ATI SUCKS. There, I said it.
NVidia drivers, both the free/Free ones WORK as a rule, and the hardware is very good.

Brother? perhaps it was a brand new unit, insufficient info (IIRC at least SOME Broter products DO work well under Linux)

Most (at least commercial) Linux distros have this neat feature available online usually called a "hardware compatability database".

If some widget works for one distro, it probably CAN work on all of them if you add the drivers, but at a totally green user/admin level, that's unlikely to happen as it requires work/knowledge..

It lists what is OFFICIALLY supported, and sometimes things that work anyway, but have limitations like nonstandard video modes and undocumented, nonstandard interfaces.

The All In Wonder series video cards/grabbers are a perfect example of this... They have never worked well if at all under Linux.. Everyone elses does for the most part.

Better luck next time, and Google is your friend.

Re:Not good from my experience

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Stephanie,

Linux was not made with house-wives in mind.
Either employ someone that knows what they are actually doing
or kindly cease nagging and return to playing solitaire in ME.

Like most modern women that can't cook - and can't be bothered about learning IT (there is always some nerd to crawl under your desk), You are a true disgrace to you gender.

Shame on you - says Ada Lovelace.
Bet you don't even know who she was.
Slow brain.

Metaphor: "grab fate by the balls"???

[Anonymous Coward]

go ahead and grab fate by the balls. No one ever got anywhere in life by playing it safe. ;-)

Grabbing Fate's balls doesn't seem like such a good idea - I mean, if you were Fate, wouldn't that piss you off?

Can't I "reach for the brass ring" instead? And wouldn't that be much more hygienic anyway?

Re:Metaphor: "grab fate by the balls"???

[Anonymous Coward]

Grabbing Fate's balls doesn't seem like such a good idea - I mean, if you were Fate, wouldn't that piss you off?

No one ever got anywhere in life by playing it safe.

Re:The main mistake is changing everything togethe

[iabervon]

A fifth of the capacity of their system before they switched to Linux was on hardware purchased in 2001 to handle the rush of bookings when airports reopenned after September 11th. Most likely, routine upgrades in capacity and regular equipment replacement meant that the rest of their system was relatively recent as well; the savings on running a modern mainframe over running a 1970s era one (in terms of maintenance, power usage, and space occupied for the amount of computational power) would pay for buying a new one.

Re:Not good from my experience

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, that's the whole point - nobody does "research" when they build up home/desktop systems (except obsessed gamers), they buy the hardware, install the software, and expect it to *just work* (yes, with a buttload of annoying M$ defects, but it generally comes up). That's the standard set by Windows, and Linux doesn't come close.

When I build up a Linux box I'm careful to check the HCL (when I can find it) and pick hardware which I'm pretty sure will work... but it's a pain , takes days - not exactly a "consumer" experience, where you go to the store, put down your credit card, and take home a system (or, in my case, collection of parts) with confidence that it will work. Building my last Linux box, I was careful not to buy a too-new graphics card (and avoided PCI-X mobo), because who knows if it will work yet, and I found documentation that a specific older AGP card *would* work. If it were a Windoz box, I'd have just gone to Fry's or online and bought all the parts in a day.

Until Linux gets drivers that *fully* support most hardware (including printers, scanners, etc), I'm not telling ma to put Linux on her machines. Oh, and then there's installing new software - you basically have to build from source to avoid going on an internet treasure hunt for compatible library versions (okay, commercial apps probably come with decent installers, following rant is based on installing FOSS SW). Building from source (and/or the treasure hunt) can take a long time for complex apps. Sure, Debian has a way to automate the treasure hunt, but what state does that leave your system in when it's finished? Does all the previously installed SW still work? The same way as it did before the install?

Windows use to have problems with shared libraries years ago, it got fixed. Apps now get delivered with their own DLLs (not shared). You can install new SW without affecting old SW, and typical SW installation is an automated 5-30 minute process. FOSS apps like Firefox are typically far easier to install on Windows than on linux. I can run simple executables compiled years ago on just about any recent windows box, regardless of version. On Windows, programs just run.

Look, this is all fine - Linux isn't intended as a consumer OS, it's developers don't care about getting on plebes' desktops. Read Linus on how he doesn't support binary drivers across Linux versions, on purpose, because he doesn't want to have to maintain a backward-compatibility layer. Making linux-use into a consumer experience just isn't on his radar; Suse and others may want to try, but they'll probably fail as long as the OS core isn't being designed for it, on purpose.

So everybody please stop selling linux as a desktop solution; I wish it were true, but it isn't. I run Linux and windows at home, use it all day at work, love it, and yes M$ SW/OS have *plenty* of their own problems (especially artificial intelligence features where it tries to guess what you wanted to do and then does it, like de-installing my scanner driver because I unplugged it from USB before booting once, or Word constantly popping windows up at me because it guessed I might want to see them, when I'm in the middle of working, or rearranging the menues each time I pull them down based on recent selections so I can't learn commands by position)... but linux is not ready for ma, and may never be.

Re:Not good from my experience

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, good, I am trying to install Windows on a Sparc-laptop here, any ideas?
Oh my, you mean, Windows does not support sparc? How about arm? How about wifi-drivers out of the box? None?
Heck, Ubuntu even autoconfigured my webcam, which I need to download drivers for, if I want it to work under Windows.
Just because you don't know anything about what kind of hardware Linux supports, does not mean it isn't supported.

switching to lunix

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it finally happened today. I switched to Linux. This morning I was writing a corporate email to send to everyone in our Exchange network and after 2 hours of drafting, typing, composing and formatting.... Outlook crashed. I called our department IT tech to see if anything could be done to recover my email but the whole outlook .pst storage file was corrupted!!!!! I didn't want this to happen again so I popped in my knoppix disk I had at my desk and fired up Evolution and started redoing my work. I got my work done thanks to an emergency boot disk and I am in the process of downloading Debian to install on my work computer. Windows sucks, I can't wait to show this to more co-workers who can be more productive. I can stick it to M$ with every PC at work I can switch to linux. Plus tuxracer is really fun to play for breaks :-)